Dayz Like These

Days like these, wow…
teaching and learning
and walking your truth
in this mad, mad world
is some complicated shit.

Entangled histories
of blood and bone,
marrow and leather
iron and feather
so much fire and retribution
without a burning bush.

Yet the land still smells of smoke
acrid wind and wildfires ripping through
the scrub of broken hill and oro valley
where the bones of miners and conquistadors
are still strewn thick across the land.

Did you know that a dentist
used to have his shop
in the same building you now live,
in the new place you call home,
which is always already the place
that someone else used to call home
before you came to called it home
back when New York was still on fire,
after El Museo del Barrio,
but before they tore down the murals
to make way for the 57-block rezoning
high-rises, yoga studios and yippie little dogs
before the Italians moved south,
before the British were kicked out,
before the Dutch arrived with their walls,
before the Lenape fled for their lives,
before the foxes and beavers vanished.

Complicated business
this coming and going
of inhabiting places and spaces,
this making and unmaking of homes
so many wounds, so few solutions
memories survive like scars
only sharper, and deeper
etched into the grooves of mortar
still stained red with the blood
of dead murals on Spanish Harlem brick.

The old song my grandpa used to sing
about barber shops and doughnut shops
and the value of a nickle
seem like mere distant echoes
bouncing along a small string
stretched taught between two old soup cans-
chicken and minestrone, red and white labels
faded from the solar plagues and acid rains.

How did I come to be
in these lands, on these lands
lands, land, and, an, a a a
a what…
can i get an a-men?
with blessings from reverend Snoop
in his bespoken priestly robes
of gold and velvet, dreaming
of a time of red and green, black and gold
when queens still ruled
and we were all children of panthers
roaming the jungles and savannas
and howling at the moon.

We danced under the cenotes and oaks
the acacia and the kosso
children of the earth and sky and water
and everything in between
through the three worlds,
across the fourth dimension
where time has yet to think of itself
in the past present tense.

Someone wants to know if 
I want to change my life
with Chaos Magick?
Start learning now, the ad says
because superstring theory
predicts the collapse of the bitcoin economy
long before your blockchain PhD
losses its value in the great Anthropocene crash
of 2049, or was it 2022?
the records are all still a blur,
like trying to listen to vinyl
left in the sun for too long,
warped and waggly and psychedelic
with noise that is, yet is not
on an old wind-up Victrola.

These words mean nothing
these words mean everything
codes inside ciphers inside letters
yet they spell something primal in me
that wants to run and dance and scream.
How did we learn to be satisfied
with these fleshbags and roller chairs
in the presence of such cosmic grandeur?

Oh children of the stars,
never lose your way,
never forget where you came from,
never forget who you are
never fear to dream too big, only too little
never forget to ask permission first
so you don’t have to ask forgiveness later
some things once done,
cannot be unmade.